300,000 dead in U.S.
• Devastating milestone hit as vaccines are distributed,
The U.S. death toll from the coronavirus topped 300,000 Monday just as the country began dispensing COVID-19 shots in a monumental campaign to conquer the outbreak.
The number of dead rivals the population of Pittsburgh. It is equivalent to repeating a tragedy on the scale of Hurricane Katrina every day for 5½ months. It is more than five times the number of Americans killed in the Vietnam War. It is equal to a 9/11 attack every day for more than 100 days.
“The numbers are staggering — the most impactful respiratory pandemic that we have experienced in over 102 years, since the iconic 1918 Spanish flu,” Dr. Anthony Fauci, the government’s top infectious-disease expert, said days before the milestone was reached.
The U. S. crossed the bleak threshold on the same day health care workers rolled up their sleeves for Pfizer’s COVID-19 shot — a day of optimism despite the death toll as the nation starts the biggest vaccination campaign in U.S. history. If a second vaccine from Moderna is authorized soon, as expected, 20 million people could be immunized by month’s end.
“I feel hopeful today. Relieved,” critical care nurse Sandra Lindsay said after getting a shot in the arm at Long Island Jewish Medical Center in New York. “I feel like healing is coming.”
With a countdown of “three, two, one,” workers at Ohio State University’s Wexner Medical Center gave the first injections to applause.
And in suburban New Orleans, Steven Lee, an intensive care pharmacist at Ochsner Medical Center, summed up the moment as he got his own vaccination: “We can finally prevent the disease as opposed to treating it.”
Other hospitals around the country, from Rhode Island to Texas, unloaded precious frozen vials of vaccine made by Pfizer Inc. and its German partner BioNTech, with staggered deliveries set throughout the day and Tuesday. A few other countries have authorized the vaccine, including Britain, which started vaccinating people last week, and Canada, which began doing so Monday.
For health care workers, who along with nursing home residents are first in line for vaccination, hope is tempered by grief and the sheer exhaustion of months spent battling a virus that is still surging in the U.S. and around the world.
The death toll was reported by Johns Hopkins University from data supplied by health authorities across the nation. The real number of lives lost is believed to be much higher, in part because of deaths that were not accurately recorded as coronavirus related during the early stages of the crisis.
Globally, the virus is blamed for more than 1.6 million deaths.
“This is the light at the end of the tunnel. But it’s a long tunnel,” New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo said. Experts say it could take well into spring for the shots and other measures to bring cases and deaths under control in the U.S.
With cold weather driving people inside — where the virus spreads more easily — and many Americans disdainful of masks and other precautions, some public health authorities project 100,000 more could die before the end of January.
“We are heading into probably the worst period possible because of all the things we had in the spring, which is fatigue, political resistance, maybe the loss of all the good will we had about people doing their part,” said Jennifer Nuzzo, a public health researcher at Johns Hopkins.
Ms. Nuzzo contrasted the government’s scattershot response with the massive mobilization undertaken after nearly 3,000 Americans were killed in the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.
“To think now we can just absorb in our country 3,000 deaths a day as though it were just business as usual, it just represents a moral failing,” she said.